Profile: Carrie Prejean

Carrie Prejean was a participant or observer in the following events:

Washington Post Style columnist Anna Holmes, the founder of Jezebel (.com), lambasts billionaire television host, rumored presidential candidate, and “birther” enthusiast Donald Trump for exhibiting a pattern of sexism throughout his business and entertainment career. As her first example, she cites “the Trump rule,” which was described by conservative Miss USA winner Carrie Prejean in 2009. Trump owns the Miss USA beauty pageant and exercises a strong degree of control over it, including taking part in selecting contestants. Prejean wrote in her memoir that Trump required potential contestants to “parade” in front of him so he could sort them into two groups: those he found sexually appealing, and those he did not. Prejean wrote: “Many of the girls found this exercise humiliating. Some of the girls were sobbing backstage after [Trump] left, devastated to have failed even before the competition really began… even those of us who were among the chosen couldn’t feel very good about it—it was as though we had been stripped bare.” Holmes calls Prejean’s description “[s]trong stuff, made even more provocative considering it comes from a woman who made her career participating in events known for their focus on aesthetic appeal.” In early April 2011, New York Times columnist Gail Collins cited the example of a column she wrote chiding Trump, and his response—sending her a photograph of herself with his words “Face of a Dog!” scrawled across it (see April 1-8, 2011). Trump has asked the male contestants on his reality television series The Apprentice to rate their female counterparts based on appearance; in 2005, according to one female contestant, Trump told her, “I bet you make a great wife.” In 2007, he attacked actress Angelina Jolie by disparaging her sexual history, telling CNN host Larry King, “[S]he’s been with so many guys… I just don’t even find her attractive.” That same year, he inked a deal with Fox to develop a reality show called Lady or a Tramp? in which he would school “out-of-control young women” in what Holmes calls “the art of becoming modern-day Eliza Doolittles.” The show was never produced. In 2006, Trump attacked comedian Rosie O’Donnell, calling her a “big, fat pig” and an “animal” after she criticized him on the air. Trump once said of his daughter, Ivanka, “She does have a very nice figure… if [she] weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” Holmes writes that Trump’s recent reversal of his position on abortion—he now opposes it—is rooted in his sexism, though he knows little about the legal underpinnings of it; he recently demanded to know of an MSNBC interviewer what abortion law has to do with a woman’s right to privacy. In early 2011, Trump confidant Michael Cohen explained his boss’s change on abortion thusly: “People change their positions all the time, the way they change their wives.” Holmes concludes by citing Trump’s statement to an Esquire reporter in 1991, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of [expletive].” [Washington Post, 4/29/2011]

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